RefereeUmpireSchool.com

[refereeumpire76]

Originally Posted by jicecone

Heres my Feedback

Right off the bat, I can see this site is more about making a buck, (which is fine), then having a new creative approach to grab umpires intrests. Kind of like walking into a new resturant that was cheaply designed and constructed, then serving a just ok meal. You will probabbly not get a lot of return customers.

First of all , lose the whistle, it not used in Baseball.

Next, it is obvious that just about everything is copied from other sites and the ingenuity of a new website just doesn't do much for me. Google.com is more helpful.

As already suggested and is obivious, this site was NOT well planned, and probably took more time to put together than the time used to plan and test it. And I personnally know that what I see, was not that difficult to establish in web development, now days.

You might want to try and capture a more limited audience first and expand from there. Twenty years ago you probably would have had something usefull but, that was twenty years ago.

I can relate to the fact that due to high unemployment, there are some REALLY ingenious ideas out there to make some easy money. I could be wrong however, I just don't see this site as being one.

Keep trying though.

Jicecone, thanks for your feedback. We appreciate you taking the time to help us out.

First of all, regarding the whistle, our original intention was to continue building the site for officials of other sports (soccer, basketball, and hockey), but we started with baseball because contrary to popular opinion we actually do have some experience in this sport. But all the same, I think we will lose the whistle.

With regard to the planning, we weren't sure what to do. The site did take us a lot of hours to put together. Originally, the navigation bar had something like 12 items in it and we decided to rearrange it.

Our "plan" was to write some content about camps and clinics, some content about the rule book, some about equipment, and mainly to focus on what non-umpires need to do to get started in the profession. We wanted to get feedback on that content before we spent a lot more time developing and organizing the site.

We haven't done any "testing" at all yet. When we posted on the forum, we were just trying to get feedback on what content would be useful to rookies and non-umps who want to get started. Now that we're getting that feedback, we'll be able to rearrange the site and plan it out a little better.

A lot of the people on these forums have misunderstood what we're trying to do. We're not trying to teach the pros. We're trying to help out non-umpires...good people who want to get started in the profession.

We're not trying to position ourselves as umpiring authorities...it's not like we're claiming we're MLB umps here. We have some experience in travel leagues, and that's the type of person we want to help. Think about a high school baseball player who wants to ump for a travel league, but he doesn't even know what to do to get started. That's who the site is for.

All we're asking on the forum is, what would be useful to that person. We're not trying to teach the old dogs new tricks or impress all the hot shots on the forum. We're just trying to get the young guys started.

Regarding "making a buck," we're hosting ads in the hope that they will pay for the cost of the site. It costs us about $100 a year in hosting and domain fees. We're just trying to recoup some of that. We're not trying to make a million dollars, and we're not stupid enough to think that this site is going to write anyone's meal ticket.

Thanks again for your feedback and your encouragement.